He was not originally welcomed into politics in Chicago. Those leaders from the civil rights era felt that they'd paved the path established themselves considered him an interloper from who knows where who didn't respect how hard they'd worked for their political power. Everyone adores him now, but back in his early years here, this was not the case. His background was not an asset. You can say that's just the corrupt gang-like nature of Chicago politics, but he explicitly came to Chicago because it was the center of black politics in America. Everything was a double-edged sword.

just admit that everything you know about black politics in America amounts to a Frontline campaign biopic whose setting is ...

a city some call the "capital of black America," to work as a community organizer and try to sort out his dual identities. Colleagues say that after a few years he had found peace with who he was, but had become frustrated by his inability to change the larger structural problems behind the poverty he saw in Chicago's South Side.

...thanks to 70 years of DNC electioneering itself epitomized by a mayoral mafia --I mean, going back to FDR, Farley, and yella dog Ed Kelly-- and slum lords Rezko and Jarrett. The bright spots of egalitarian justice being H. Washington and Mosely-Braun.

Of course Frontline implies "center of black politics" in the Shakespearean sense of "black," right? Dismal by comparison to black politics in any other state since Reconstruction.

See, I hafta follow Barry's PIRG line from NYC through a classified ad to the windy city. It's more believable.

You're funny. A 50-state history spanning 600 years of a people whose "identity politics" were invisible in The Literature until The Cultural Revolution of the 20th century. In a diary.

I might be able to compile a bibliography of less than 3,500 words. Over the next few weeks. Let me give that a whirl. hmmm, random selection from the stacks ...

Jan Carew, Fulcrums of Change (1988)

Peter Martyr, the first major historian of the Americas, and a reasonably reliable source considering that he never set foot in the Indies or the mainland territories, mentions in passing that the Pinzón brothers of whom Martin Alonso was Columbus' chief pilot and one of his principal partners in his "Enterprise of the Indies," were everywhere known as "Negro Pinzóns." These brothers, as both their Spanish names and their reputations as renowned seamen indicates, were Afro-Spanish and middle-class. They were also much better off financially than Columbus since they could afford to make a substantial monetary investment in his first voyage. ...

After the first voyage, the chronicle of the Black presence takes on new dimensions: In 1513, thirty Negroes helped Balboa hack his way throught the tropical undergrowth to reach the Pacific Ocean. There were Black soldiers with Ponce de Leon, when he set out to find the Fountain of Youth, and inadvertantly landed on the Florida coast. Langston Hughes in his Famous Negro Heroes of America [1958], wrote:

'When Hernando Cortez invaded Mexico in 1519, one of the Negroes in his army of 700 found in his ration of rice one day some grains of wheat. These he planted, and is so credited with introducing the first wheat onto the mainland of the New World. And by 1523 there were so many Negroes in Mexico that it was decided to limit their entrance since it was thought they might try to seize the ruling powers from the Spaniards --as indeed some in 1537 were accused of plotting to do.' ...

Herrera [y Tordesillas, Antonio] had actually lived and travelled extensively in the New World. Here is his chronicle of events that took place between 1531 and 1548.

Negroes born in America were found to be better laborers than those brought from Guinea.

The king (of Spain) had sent the force of two ships to make war on the Caribs ...It was the general opinion that the troubles on this land [Puerto Rico] were caused by negro slaves, Wolofs and Berberici, and so the king was asked to send more.

'1533. The Wolofs of San Juan were declared to be haughty, disobedient, rebellious, and incorrigible, and could not be taken to any part of the Indies without express permission.

In Quivira, Mexico, there was a Negro who had taken holy ecclesiastic Orders.

There was established at Guamanga, three Brotherhoods of the True Cross of Spaniards, one for the Indians, and one for Negroes.

oh, snap. I almost forgot Elizabeth Donnan. Crucial empirical, demographic source material, foundational really to debunking the stereotype of a black culture and politics. Demystifies the ancient curse of being "sold down river." Not to mention diffusion of "values voters" in The Great Migration um upstream.

If the answer to the question, "What is the centre of black politics in America today?", is money --capital gain, bebe-- then the next surely concerns the so-called ingenuity of the "post-racial" individual American.

Which should "represents" nothing of race. And kinda problematizes the "intellectual debate" about nationalizing "our better history." If there were a debate.

Your answer makes the point that the difference between the situation in US is a just a tiny little bit different to that in Europe. But still people insist on comparing the situation of African-Americans with much smaller populations of recent immigrants.

Which isn't to say the situation in Europe isn't wrong in many ways (as it still is in the US), it's just not useful to make glib, illiterate comparisons between the two situations.